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Posts tagged: Alpharetta

Last week I went to Alpharetta, Georgia in suburban Atlanta to see HP’s Graphic Arts Experience Center. Opened in March of 2011, the site is a 60,000-square-foot showcase of HP’s graphic arts portfolio including its Indigo, SmartStream, Inkjet Web Press, Designjet & Scitex wide format, and Specialty Printing Systems (SPS) inkjet offerings. In addition to acting as a sales hub, the site also houses training facilities and is a center for graphic arts business development services for HP customers in the Americas.

I was invited to the Experience Center to attend an HP customer event along with a handful of industry analysts and trade magazine editors. It was an eye-opening experience in a number of ways and in this blog I’d like to share three insights I gained from the visit.

Make It Matter

The HP slogan ‘Make It Matter,’ which you see in HP promotional posters and on their employees’ business cards, has always reminded me of that scene toward the end of the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’ where a dying Tom Hanks tells Matt Damon to ‘earn it.’ Movie dramatics aside, what HP has done with it Graphic Arts Experience Center has a lot to do with ‘making it matter.’ Bringing the whole portfolio (including Inkjet Web Press and SPS) under one roof makes a lot of sense and is particularly important given the cross-over opportunities for existing and future HP customers. That the site serves multiple purposes for sales, training, and business development is also key. The Experience Center has recently added an Inkjet Web Press T200 (that’s been upgraded to a T230) and it would also have an Indigo W7250 if it hadn’t been for the surge in demand for the product (the unit targeted to the Experience Center went to a customer in Massachusetts). I was highly impressed with the broad range of print samples, in fact, I felt like a kid in a candy store. (I madeÂ a video with some of those samples.) The samples cover a range of markets including commercial print, direct mail, technical, publishing, signage, labeling, packaging, and pro-photography printing.